


You Are The Road (That Bridges the Waters and Keeps Me From Cold)

by explosionshark



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-06
Updated: 2014-01-06
Packaged: 2018-01-07 17:19:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1122464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/explosionshark/pseuds/explosionshark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ymir had taken a piece of Christa with her, when she'd left. Christa intended to have it back. (Spoilers up to chapter 50)</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Are The Road (That Bridges the Waters and Keeps Me From Cold)

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from the song "Furnace Woods" by Moving Mountains - do yourself a favor and go listen. Thanks again to tumblr user brappzannigan for betaing. This one got jossed pretty damn quick, but it's still one of my favorite works I've written, I think. Changed a minor detail from the version posted on tumblr.

Life becomes remarkably calm once they make their way back inside the walls. It’s like stepping into another world; the whirlwind of chaos and fear that had been Christa’s entire existence drowned out by the mundanity of life in human territory.

She feels like a different person, a puzzle piece that just doesn’t fit. The sights and sounds and smells that she’d grown up with are alien, unnerving, wrong.

The fifth night, they are invited to a pub by a garrison guard. A long overdue celebration of their survival, he’d phrased it.

Christa spends the night pressed into a booth in the darkest corner of the place flanked by the surviving members of the 104th, with the exception of Armin, Mikasa, and Eren who had been spirited away to Wall Sina the moment they’d hit the gates.

As with everything since her return, the alcohol leaves a bitter taste in her mouth and churns unpleasantly in her gut. She drinks anyway, not knowing what else to do.

The soldiers move stiffly through their revelry, puppets on strings, smiles wooden, coughing out halting laughter through feats of ventriloquism.

It’s hard to watch.

Connie and Jean walk her home, Connie’s shoulder a sturdy crutch beneath her arm, Jean’s grip tight around her elbow. Her knees have gone to water and she can’t seem to get enough air in her lungs.

The pressure behind her eyeballs that has been building all night begins to ache in earnest. When she raises one clenched, sweaty fist to rub away the pain, she realizes she’s been crying. She chokes on a gasp in surprise and hates the tearful, fluttering noise that springs from her throat.

Connie looks up in concern and she can feel his gaze on her face, her cheeks flushing red in shame. Mercifully, when he opens his mouth it isn’t to offer some meaningless platitude or expression of concern (if one more person asks her if she’s “okay” she thinks she might blow a hole in the wall herself and be done with it), it’s to declare that the smell of Christa’s armpits would make an even more powerful weapon against the titans than Eren’s new abilities.

Christa laughs and it only sounds a little bit like a sob and she’s grateful.

x.x.x

A week later, the Legion receives their first new orders since returning to the walls, although they are frustratingly vague.

Another expedition will be launching, reads the missive tacked to the wall of the barracks one morning. They are to prepare themselves.

And that’s it. No mention of an exact date or an objective, just the vague, ominous appeal to readiness.

As battered and broken as the surviving members of the Legion were, the call to arms was met with almost universal relief. It was acclimation, Jean claimed cynically at dinner. As complete and unceasing as the horrors of the outside world were, it had become normal to them. Since falling back to the safety of the walls, none of the scouts had stopped being scared - they had merely become unable to justify the sharp edge of terror that sliced through every waking moment.

Without Eren there had been no one there to challenge Jean’s bold assertions. Christa doubted that he would have been able to, even if he were present.

When she looks up at the walls, she doesn’t see safety, she doesn’t see god.

She sees a cage.

It feels as much to keep her inside as it does to keep the titans out.

x.x.x

Training is a welcome change from the listless malaise of the previous weeks.

Christa rises before the sun. She pushes herself, running until her lungs feel like they could burst from her chest, until she thinks she might die. And when the pain is overwhelming, when she’s sure she can’t go on any longer, she does. Another lap, another 100 meters, whatever it takes for Christa to teach herself that the notion of impossibility is a luxury she can no longer afford.

After breakfast, there are 3DMG drills.

She trains brutally, starting with the basics. She selects simple, rudimentary maneuvers, doing them again, and again, and again until she is sick and dizzy. She repeats the beginner drills until the straps of her gear bite painfully into her flesh, leaving bright red welts and raw, chafing sores that slowly transform to rigid calluses. She trains until the gear becomes a part of her body, until exercise gives way to instinct. With the basics mastered, she moves onto more complex maneuvers and formations.

The first two weeks of the regimen, Christa’s body is so abused by lunch time that Connie has to bring her meal to her.

By the third week she can walk.

By the fourth week, she can walk straight.

By the fifth, she runs.

So it goes.

After lunch, she trains for strength and for endurance. She focuses on key muscle groups, her legs, her thighs, her upper arms, working not for vanity, but for utility.

Three days a week to give her muscles a rest from the constant punishment, she focuses on her 3DMG maintenance. She takes her unit completely apart, rebuilds it until she knows every screw and gear of its guts; every scratch and dent and blemish on its surface. Reports of gear breaking down in the field are almost unheard of, but Christa knows better by now than to take anything for granted.

She ends each day with sparring.

She fights humbly and with enthusiasm, eager to learn from her mistakes. She challenges every Scout she can, and then turns her attentions elsewhere; the guards, the instructors, the braver members of the training squads that have begun to trickle in. She wishes she had learned more from Mikasa when they were trainees together. She even finds herself wishing for Annie, the thought rising unbidden in her chest one day, and catching so painfully on her heart that she falters and is submitted by a burly trainee with more muscle than sense.

Connie impresses her with his dedication to relearning close quarters combat techniques. They meet nightly behind the barracks and fight with sticks of charcoal in place of knives, learning to dodge and twist and evade until the first triumphant night they can both return to their quarters, uniforms spotless.

She falls into her bunk most nights so exhausted she can barely think.

This is what it takes.

x.x.x

The grounds are nearly overwhelmed with trainees.

Their fascination with the Scouting Legion is plain. Between drills and classes they linger on the edges of the training grounds, watching the scouts as they go through their exercises with a mixture of reverence and fear.

Christa feels the weight of their gaze as if it were a stone around her neck. The attention is exhausting.

One evening she lingers in the mess haul after supper. She watches as they laugh and tease one another, a raucous crowd of clueless innocents.

She wonders if she ever could have been so young.

It is her 16th birthday.

x.x.x

The scar is faint. It seems to go unnoticed by most people.

She wishes it were bigger. She wishes it spread across her entire face, too large and present to be politely dismissed. She wishes someone would ask her about it, just so she had the chance to talk.

It is a pale white thing, a thin slash against the pinkness of her mouth.

At night, alone, she traces its path with the pad of her finger, a motion she idly considers to be similar to that of one seeking the phantom press of a lover’s kiss.

It is all she has left to remember Ymir by.

The fourth or fifth time they’d sparred, when Christa’s skill began to exceed Ymir’s size as an advantage, things had gotten heated.

Up to the point she began losing, Ymir had always been gentle with Christa, in her own obtuse way. When they fought, she would manhandle the smaller girl obnoxiously, but with just enough care to prevent injury.

And then Christa began to win.

And she was not humble about it.

Ymir was a sore loser, but an even worse winner. She boasted terribly, braying her victory for hours, lording her apparent superiority over whatever poor soul had failed to overcome her.

So, obviously, when Christa began to turn the tables, she had to give Ymir a taste of her own medicine, for the good of everyone else.

Which lead to that day, brute strength versus skill. Christa had finally wrestled Ymir into a frantic chokehold, but her grip was off, technique giving way to fatigue and adrenaline. Ymir, in her graceless thrashing, had slammed the back of her head into Christa’s mouth with all her strength, splitting Christa’s lower lip painfully open with the force of the blow.

Ymir had always had such a hard head.

The pain woke Christa up, made her furious, and she reworked the choke, executed it viciously until Keith Shaddis broke them up. Even on the verge of consciousness, Ymir still refused to tap out.

Hard headed.

x.x.x

Two months after the initial missive was posted, Erwin and Levi make their way to the training grounds to announce that the expedition will launch at the end of the week.

She listens as they lay out the parameters of the mission, their goals, their contingencies, the basics of strategy. The specifics of the mission will be drilled into her by the end of the week until she can recite them from memory. The Scouting Legion is never anything less than meticulously prepared when it leaves the walls, for all the good it does them.

Christa scans the faces in the crowd as the Commander gives his speech. She wonders at the motivations of her fellow soldiers. Duty, she imagines. And revenge, certainly. A naked will to survive.

She brushes her fingertips against her bottom lip absently, gaze shifting to the silhouette of the walls peaking just beyond the horizon.

x.x.x

 

She meets Connie for their last sparring session before the expedition sets out tomorrow. When they finish they collapse onto the ground, sweaty and exhausted, grateful for the cool blades of grass against their heated skin.

Christa lets the charcoal slide out of her hand, raising her head with a groan to check her uniform.

“I’m clean,” she pants, dropping her head back to the ground, relishing the familiar ache of her muscles.

“Me too,” Connie announces.

The silence that stretches between them remains unbroken for several long minutes, a feat Christa would never have thought Connie capable of 6 months ago.

“Do you think that we’ll see her?” Connie asks, voice so soft Christa could almost believe she imagined it.

She lets out a deep, measured breath instead of answering, closing her eyes as a breeze rushes by. The distant rustle of leaves becomes a garbled croak of speech, the hair blowing across her face pushed there by a massive clawed finger.

“Christa?”

“We will,” Christa breathed. “We have to.”

Ymir had taken a piece of Christa with her, when she’d left. Christa intended to have it back.


End file.
